Ye Olde Inn

Have you ever wondered just how many bits and pieces you'd need to run a full game of the Dark Company without reusing anything? No? Just me?

Well as one who obviously has to much time on their hand I went and figured out how many tiles/furniture you'd actually need for this, without recycling stuff from prior parts of the board.

4 Heroquest Gameboards (Which I'm surprised to say I can almost manage, having a UK, US and Advanced version).
51 Single Rubble/Block Tiles
10 Double Rubble/Block Tiles
17 Secret Door Tiles
13 Pit Tiles
3 Alchemist's Benches
10 Bookcases
3 Cupboards
3 Fireplaces
4 Racks
4 Sorcerer's Tables
12 Tables
5 Thrones
2 Tombs
14 Treasure Chests
3 Weapon Racks

Now if you had manage to get a hold of 4 sets of Heroquest the above furniture and tiles isn't to undoable, you'd need to get yourself some extra bookcases, tables a throne and some more chests, but the real killer is.

114 to 130 Doors*.

Even with those four sets, you'd have about 64 Open Doors and 20 Closed Doors.

*Depending if you wanted to have a door sat on the board edge between two boards, or try and do the little mini-passages shown on the quest map, in which case you may also want 16 short passage tiles to connect each board section.

Although less necessary as Monsters typically don't stay on the board for that long (unless the players are doing a weird passive sightseeing tour of Dark Company's map) here is a complete list of monsters too.

26 Goblins
55 Orcs
21 Fimir
6 Zombies (1 being Vadim Gorfell)
6 Mummies
3 Gargoyles
49 Men-at-Arms 'Dark Warriors'
19 Chaos Warriors 'Doom Guard' (1 being Hinsgrim)
1 Chaos Sorcerer (Delzarron)

Surprisingly not, one, single, Skeleton :/

Well I'm not sure this is useful to anyone (who would be crazy enough to try and run it like this ) but I thought I'd post it up for a laugh if nothing else.

yes, nice list! Can be useful if the Heroes split and each one takes their ways!

I actually made sure to acquire all of that to run it.

I agree that it’s the amount of doors needed that makes playing this way impractical. And I don’t ever want to reset the board either.

This is why I decided to redraw this adventure to make it more playable;
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5013

Yeah, I playtested Dark Company and after having to reset the board several times it grew more painstaking then fun.
After all the heroes have maxed out (certainly after Frozen Horror and Mage of the Mirror) they're very formidable and splitting up is actually a fair option.
I only had 2 boards, but it got to the point that I needed 3 because of split ups and just having to cut through one board to get back to another one. For this purpose I ordered a 3rd board (just the board) and I noticed additional chests were needed, but I never bothered counting up the doors.
Good heavens you're right! I'm going to need to buy a lot more doors for this quest alone.
I noticed some quests in the Frozen Horror required additional open doors then what came with the game, but I had two boards.
For purposes of consistancy, yes, I would rather play this with 4 boards and the accurate # of furniture, tiles, etc. But the odds of the heroes venturing onto all 4 boards at once is very unlikely. Whenever my crew get there I'll have to do with what best I've got. But let me assure you, I will most certainly be ordering more doors.

I too have noticed the lack of skeletons... kinda depressing for a hero itching to use the Bone Wand.

So, how many of the individual Dark Warrior types do you specifically need?
And the breakdown of the actual types for monsters? (Not just what the picture says it is.)

I saw one section that explicitly requires 5 crossbow men?

In that analysis do you have a breakdown of what is needed to run the game if you don’t actually keep everything built? IE on a zone by zone basis?

According to the rules you clear the board after each zone is cleared, and Warriors have to wait for the group when moving to a new zone. Any “backtracking” means that all the monsters are returned, do you need to keep track of doors opened etc.? Or would it just be simpler to ‘reset’ the area and then open it up as players went back through previously cleared areas?

Oftkilted wrote:So, how many of the individual Dark Warrior types do you specifically need?

There appears to be about 50 Dark Warriors. Oddly enough there are no Dark Warriors on Map #1. The types of Dark Warriors, however, is up to Zargon. Only on a few occasions are Crossbowmen specified for certain scenarios. All other Dark Warriors are unspecified and it's up to Zargon to decide.

Zargon's assistant. Or else maybe this is the time that Zargon and Mentor finally meet! (from parallel HQ worlds)

Finally, a use for all of those extra HeroQuest sets you've been hoarding! But yes, Zargon picks based on the weapons available.

Instead of depriving some poor fan out there of a classic set though, why not 3d print 'em? Who wants to look at tons of identical copies of the same furniture anyway, get some Dungeon Decor, some Terrain Crate, anything besides just exact duplicates if you're really going to take up the entire floor and setup four boards. Good luck.

Good point above though... you can use your Skeletons to represent the Dark Warriors, just like I was going to do with my "black" reapers.

So does the base set even contain enough pieces for one of the boards? It seems like even if you use one board at a time like originally intended, you would still run out of doors and double wall blocks.